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A review by selenajournal
Everything Is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer
5.0
After having read so many books lately about being detached and rejected by society, it was refreshing to read a book about connectedness and belonging. Johnathan Safran Foer’s Everything is Illuminated was his debut novel that received raving reviews from every respectable news source that got its hands on it.
It is the story of an American-born Jewish man who is also named Jonathan Safran Foer going on a journey to Ukraine to find the woman - Augustine - that saved his grandfather from the the Nazis. Since he has no car and doesn’t speak the language, he hired a driver and an interpreter, and that is where Alex comes in, as well as his grandfather and the bitch (by bitch, I mean dog) named after grandfather’s favorite singer, Sammy Davis Jr.
The book is told through three different perspectives. The first is through letters from Alex to Jonathan, obviously after their journey has ended. The second is Alex’s retelling of the journey which he also sends to Jonathan with his letters. The third is folk-like stories of life in Trachimbrod, the town they’re looking for. That sounds like it might be a lot or might be confusing but it serves to reveal the story in layers.
If it feels like this review is a couple of years late, that is understandable because it is. This book has sadly been sitting on my to-read shelf for about two years. I remember trying to read it when I first bought it and being completely turned off by the misuse of English words. I remember not thinking it was clever. When I began reading the book now, the way that Alex spoke in his letters completely endeared him to me. I think it also may have helped that I read Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close in the mean-time. That book broke my heart and mended it at the same time. I bowed to Foer’s genius. And so decided to discover the genius in his first book.
Everything is Illuminated was a sprinkle of A Clockwork Orange, One Hundred Years of Solitude and folk-tales from a tattered old book of repetitive dreams.
It is the story of an American-born Jewish man who is also named Jonathan Safran Foer going on a journey to Ukraine to find the woman - Augustine - that saved his grandfather from the the Nazis. Since he has no car and doesn’t speak the language, he hired a driver and an interpreter, and that is where Alex comes in, as well as his grandfather and the bitch (by bitch, I mean dog) named after grandfather’s favorite singer, Sammy Davis Jr.
The book is told through three different perspectives. The first is through letters from Alex to Jonathan, obviously after their journey has ended. The second is Alex’s retelling of the journey which he also sends to Jonathan with his letters. The third is folk-like stories of life in Trachimbrod, the town they’re looking for. That sounds like it might be a lot or might be confusing but it serves to reveal the story in layers.
If it feels like this review is a couple of years late, that is understandable because it is. This book has sadly been sitting on my to-read shelf for about two years. I remember trying to read it when I first bought it and being completely turned off by the misuse of English words. I remember not thinking it was clever. When I began reading the book now, the way that Alex spoke in his letters completely endeared him to me. I think it also may have helped that I read Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close in the mean-time. That book broke my heart and mended it at the same time. I bowed to Foer’s genius. And so decided to discover the genius in his first book.
Everything is Illuminated was a sprinkle of A Clockwork Orange, One Hundred Years of Solitude and folk-tales from a tattered old book of repetitive dreams.